CloudAtCost: A Rant

This webpage is hosted in Canada through CloudAtCost. They sell lifetime hosting for a one-time fee. It's really quite a deal for someone like myself (college kid), who doesn't have a stead income. That being said, you get what you pay for.

I have never had an issue with them until last week, I rebooted my server as I often do, waited for the machine to come back, waited, waited some more, waited three days. On the third day I sent CloudAtCost a support ticket about how my machine had never come back on. Two days go by before I was given a response of "Are you still having this issues?", I explained that yes, I was infact still having the issue of not being able to contact my server. By this time I had seen other CloudAtCost customers having issues as well, venting their frustration on Twitter. This was not a localized event. Unfortunetly, these users reported that their only path to their server was to reimage, loose everything and start fresh.

Damn, I had no backups of this server and this blog! But as luck would have it the console on the website suddenly started working, I was able to get to the main command line and get everything back to working order. I mount the machine to a local folder on my MacBook via sshfs, pull all of the Ghost (this blog) data off and reboot to see if I can fix the incredibly slow I/O speed.

Dead.

Same issue as before, luckily after 24+ hours I am able to get the console working again and this time fix memmory issues in the boot process. So here I am, afraid to reboot this machine for fear of loosing this machine again.